A comic news review has occupied Radio 2's schedule for years, The News Huddlines being the longest running, harking back to the old variety tradition with a live band, dozens of scriptwriters and a regular cast of Roy Hudd, June Whitfield and Chris Emmett. It was recorded at lunchtime with a live audience, for many of whose members it had become a regular social fixture.

You may remark, in those last two sentences, some of the reasons why Huddlines is now part of broadcasting history. It had musicians, arrangers and writers, costly items all. It had an old audience, something the BBC felt should be discouraged.

Hudd and Whitfield were, happily for them, also in demand for more lucrative television work, and so, for one reason and another, the programme just faded away like the Cheshire Cat in Alice, leaving behind, as did that famous feline, a smile in the air.

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Other shows followed, based around younger, less established comedians, Andy Parsons and Henry Naylor, for instance, or Andrew Collins and Jon Holmes.

These seem to write most of their own material and music usually comes from one performer. Their audiences bay, whoop and whistle in the modern manner. For the listener at home, however, what tends to linger afterward is a feeling of anxiety, unpurged by mirth.

This is understandable but not desirable. If you are making fun of the news, it is a challenge that grows more formidable with every heart-sinking week. What the audience needs to be able to laugh at the news is a performance that regularly reduces it to graspable good humour.

So here comes Clive Anderson who, as we know from other programmes on all sorts of networks, is clever, quick-witted and brave. He has four guests to whom he throws a succession of current issues – examination reform, modern architecture, government proposals on casinos – in the manner of a seal-keeper feeding his charges.

Mention the teaching of classic texts in today's schools and, whoosh, up leaps Arthur Smith spouting Shakespeare. Say gambling and here comes Anna Raeburn, dripping disgust. Murmur digital radio and there's Phill Jupitus, recognisable from the BBC commercial for his 6 Music radio show if not from the programme itself.

I was getting along very nicely with it all, laughing moderately but regularly, when the name of Boris Johnson caused the fourth guest, Brian Sewell, to hurl himself not in the direction of the Shadow Minister for the Arts but at the city the eminent spokesman famously visited last week.

Liverpool, declared Sewell in his distinctive tones of scorn, is "the British armpit". He did not further particularise or exemplify but stuck to his verdict, even when Anna Raeburn claimed armpit supremacy for the North East.

Now, such a verdict from Sewell may induce those who cannot abide his pursed-lipped pronouncements to fling themselves aboard the nearest Virgin Pendolino and head at once for the World Heritage site that is Liverpool's waterfront, or the Walker Art Gallery (which gets five stars, alongside the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, the Ashmolean in Oxford and the National Gallery in London in Mark Fisher's new guide to the best of British galleries ), or its Museum (four Fisher stars, alongside the Burrell in Glasgow and Hampton Court Palace).

But, as someone who reads Sewell's art criticism with respect if not always agreement, I was astonished to find him so severely under-informed on my noble native city. I have already sent B Johnson a postcard of the Walker's seductive Cranach, Nymph of the Fountain, in the hope that he will come up and see her some time. If her charms have not already worked on B Sewell, I doubt they ever will.

These days every radio show is immediately scanned for potential to transfer to TV. Many have and do. Dead Ringers has gone there forever, ditto Harry Hill, the Mighty Boosh, Ten Storeys High and Little Britain.

Clive Anderson first made his name compering Whose Line Is It Anyway? years ago on Radio 4, but I doubt Light Entertainment bosses will be queuing up for the rights to this one. Not unless he could guarantee Brian Sewell and Boris Johnson, the Jeeves and Wooster of culture, would do it live from Liverpool.